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Notes -
Tribal wars and the quest for meaning
(another sleep-deprived inebriated rant. The resurgence of data-driven object-level motteposting is rather welcome; those interruptions won’t be frequent).
Anatoly Karlin is a self-identified Russian Cosmist. Like me. This means, in brief, the belief in the common cosmic endowment of humanity, the moral imperative – Great Common Task – to overcome bodily death (and, ideally, reverse as many past deaths as possible by technical means, redeeming human history, regathering «particles of our fathers»), and the notion that institutions, cultures, techniques and weapons or warfare ought to be pointed away from our kin and aimed against the lethal force of nature. One may think it’s a rather obvious idea to arrive at, during the long North Eurasian winter as you see malnourished peasants «recruited» for another dumb imperial war. It was invented by Nikolai Fyodorov, and our lefty friend deponysum has a poignant note on it; also available in his book.
Karlin is not very Russian, though, from his Berkeley education to meme-heavy Imperial identity compensating for confused ethnic ties; and starting Oct 3, he’s not very Cosmist. He’s now a direct threat to projects like Musk’s, an Anti-Cosmist, if anything:
Within a day he, too, has noticed the implication, and conjured a cope:
My guess here is, he references the iconic phrase that Taras Bulba, a fictional Zaporizhian Cossack and the main character of Gogol’s eponymous book, has said to his son Andriy who has betrayed Orthodox Cossacks for love of a Polish girl – before shooting. «I gave you life, I will take it», the savage, essentially Olympian expression of patriarchic morality. It’s also one of the justifications for the whole war, of course – «Czar’s gifts», «Lenin’s Ukraine», «Khrushchev’s mistake».
Or like the late demagogue extraordinaire for hire, «telekiller» Dorenko, had uttered once in 2014 while singing a Paean to the Priest-Czar Putin:
Back in August, Alexander Dugin was accused of ritually sacrificing his daughter to the altar of Russian Empire. I think that’s vile bullshit, as far as criminology is concerned, but spiritually it may be true along those lines.
I’ve talked to a number of people whose parents have asked them why they’re not mobilized yet.
But none of this is as sad as a Cosmist proposing denial of the skies to man, for his team to not lose as hard while conquering a chunk of the European plain.
This wasn’t meant to be about Karlin and his inane proposal that has no chance of being implemented (logistics aside, Russian state cannot improvise, a Zombie system going mechanistically through Soviet materiel). This is about values. How was it in Meditations? «Multipolar traps – races to the bottom – threaten to destroy all human values».
In the draft of my Substack that’ll most likely never be released on the account of being moody and overwrought, the opening concerned values too.
No – well, except the tribe, I suppose. Except nationalism. Except that our guys be winning and making Ourtribia Great Again, or else let it all burn. Right?
…
This puts Never-Trumpers in a new light, for me (even if they specifically may have bad arguments); and suggests a general scheme for defection from entrenched positions (or in their case, from the reasonable expectation of trenches). It’s just that such situations are a good test for having principles.
If you have anything at all that is more meaningful than pure tribalist loyalty and intransigence, if your politics is a means to a certain vision and not just an end, you may arrive at a fork on your road. Sure, Our Guy At Least Will Go Down Swinging. Other than that, what does he swing for? Does he offer enough even if he triumphs over his foe, and most importantly can he deliver? You start on this path expecting tremendous things – a revolution, a revival, a revenge at least. Suppose the promise is not fulfilled even as the challenge grows. You may consider yourself betrayed, and reject the leader in turn, and say that those who remain loyal are in fact unwitting traitors of everything the movement stood for. Or you double-down in commitment to the cause, because what other way could even hint at the possibility of your vision blossoming? Surely none! This path of unreciprocated loyalty ends, logically speaking, in you giving up everything, soul and mind and vision and whatever the tribe could ever offer, in exchange for nothing but the chance of personal success for its elite; the exemplary Stalinist Party discipline, masterful exploitation of Palaeolithic reactions. Through it all, one feels righteousness, because one’s loyal comrades are close.
I suppose some leftists may suspect at times that they are no longer pursuing maximalist goals – equality, liberty, fraternity (no sarcasm); but they cannot accept that their political coalition is going in the other direction. It may be temporarily misguided, but others are deliberately hostile to justice and truth!
That’s all well and good but not sacrificing your literal children to the hollowed-out ideology, nor contradicting your own key values that are as precious as children if not more, must be a decent lower bar for a tribalist’s sanity.
P.S. Vitalik, another Western-educated Russian, responds to Karlin with mocking hope that the way things are going we’ll perfect life extension by 2024. The joke, of course, is that Vitalik is precisely the type of man who finds no purchase these days in Russia, but who epitomizes everything Karlin was meant to support, and in part it was the hope to garner support for those things that have led him to Russian nationalism. It may turn out that everything of value your tribe stood for, or seemed to stand for, can no longer survive – within its structure and under its aegis. But ideas don’t die that easily, and can become seeds of new assabiyahs, assembled elsewhere, hopefully to a large extent even from the same stock of people. This is what I’d recommend tribalists to keep in mind.
Your vision seems techno-utopian and apolitical. It's fundamentally Christian- culminating in the resurrection of the dead, the lion laying down with the lamb, redemption from original sin, and a kingdom with no end.
We already have the promise of life after death. Our essence lives on in our children and our extended kin groups. Any ideology or project that neglects that, like promising personal salvation in the form of eternal life, from whatever divine source - celestial or technological - distracts from our real avenue for achieving life after death.
And a commitment to our progeny, in hopes that they are like us but better in every way: smarter, healthier, more beautiful, is intrinsically a political project and always has been; it's not a utopian vision that presupposes solving the political.
...And so the AGI worked, endlessly tiling the universe over with genotronium - the most compact and durable representation of the AI engineer's genome possible. For the engineer did not care about continuity, and he did not care about the medium, and he did not care about the memes (for memes were, by his reasoning, wholly downstream from genes). As long as the essence was there, he reasoned, it was good enough.
It is all nice and well to care about creating new lives. "Us but better", "us but better off" and all that. The visceral hormonal joy of parenting and the spiritual enjoyment of legacy. What's pitiful and disgusting is to not only settle for it but regard it as the only way. I must be frank, as immortalities go procreation is a mocking cope handed down by the blind idiot god of evolution as an afterthought. As for settling for "us but worse off", I cannot find epithets strong enough to describe that.
Who wants to settle for "us but worse off?" I do not. But that's a political project, it's not a global humanitarian utopia or deus ex machina. It's civilization.
How else are you going to achieve your immortality? Are you going to pray to Yahweh? Receive the eucharist? Or study machine learning in joyful hope for the coming of robot-Jesus Christ? All of those aspirational dreams are fine in their own, but if they are distracting you from realizing the actual potential of your own immortality, however limited, (or worse, if they are actively inspiring behavior that ensures the decline of your progeny) then that is what I would call pitiful and disgusting.
It's a false assumption that procreation can even be called immortality. It's further from immortality than masturbation is from sex.
I agree with this. I like the idea of having kids for my own reasons but I find the idea that it's immortality as strange as people's claims that they wouldn't want immortality even with an escape clause if they eventually desired it. I can only model it as cope, trying to get into the head of someone who genuinely believes it is impossible for me.
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I was riffing on your tongue-in-cheek reference reference to reproduction as a cheap immortality. I suppose it's more similar to reincarnation. In religious myth, the quality of your reincarnation is determined by your deeds in the current life. The same applies to reproduction. Breeding habits and mate selection have either beautiful or disastrous consequences based on how society is organized and how we behave on an individual basis.
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